California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ampersandrew@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426

If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not really.

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Comments

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Olap@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it

DRM violates this principle. Atreides forever

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- catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  How do you figure? If the DRM depends on them, doesn’t that give them the power to destroy it?
  
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  - Olap@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    DRM infected files mean that you as a consumer don’t own anything. As someome else can destroy it.
    
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parpol@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
They will get around it. Instead I suggest that buy buttons should say what you’re buying.

For example: Just “buy” should not be allowed.

“Buy License” or “Rent Game” for games with DRM. “Buy game” where you own your digital copy and can do whatever you want with it.

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- Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  “Buy game” where you own your digital copy and can do whatever you want with it.
  
  Y’all ain’t ever seein’ that one.
  
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  - mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    GOG
    
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  - parpol@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Probably not. Still “buy licence” at least gives us more transparency.
    
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  - iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    How would it work, anyway?
    
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- yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  You just repeated the proposal.
  
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SomeGuy69@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Next: make it so games can’t suddenly lose their music license. This is so incredible annoying. I know it’s depending on what the publishers negotiated, but it shouldn’t be possible to suddenly patch out soundtracks because of a license expire.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that’s acceptable).
  
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- NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I’d never even heard of this before. Wtf
  
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  - yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Try downloading any GTA before 5, there will be a community guide about the missing songs and how to restore the radios.
    
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  - SomeGuy69@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Some games, like Allen Wake, have been full out removed from sale because of expired music license. There has been other cases some come back later with the music stripped.
    
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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  require games to buy perpetual licenses for the music?
  
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  - Adalast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Other way around. Require sales of licenses to games to be perpetual. The way you phrased it means that the license holders can charge way more.
    
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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Much like California’s other good-sounding laws, the fine print is what gets you on both ends, both in the law and in the EULA you agree to when signing up that’s going to say that all transactions are explicitly a terminable and revocable license.

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- dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  A revocable license for a virtual “product” whereupon they absolutely do not give you back your real world dollars if they terminate said license.
  
  There’s no power imbalance in this transaction at all, no siree.
  
  Anyway, I’m all for making backups of things. So you de-licensed me. Big whoop. I still have the file and I can still play it, and nobody can physically stop me.
  
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- JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I suppose that’s the difference between laws in the US vs the EU. In the US the wording of the law is everything. If you find some absurd loophole due to weird grammar, good for you. In the EU, at least from an outsiders perspective, the law is enforced as it was intended to be, and if you try to fuck around with wording you get fined.
  
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  - catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That’s the thing, though, it’s not a loophole. It’s intentional. It makes a good headline, but it doesn’t really do much.
    
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Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
“Ubisoft take note”

Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve… You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam and it’s the biggest store by a huge margin, don’t know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically…

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- ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam
  
  Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    So they’re not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
    
    DRM free and owner ownership means physical.
    
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  - yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    They don’t make it clear which games have steam DRM and which games have nothing at all, they only list it if it’s a third party solution like denuvo.
    
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- SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
  
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  - Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
    
    “Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and it’s not even written on paper.
    
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    They can still delete your account and cut you off from your games.
    
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  - ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    But we know that is only guaranteed for single player Valve games
    
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  - Deway@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    And yet, they always refused to put it in writing in the EULA. Wonder why.
    
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- PunchingWood@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Just people trying to ride the wave for internet points without really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s just the popular “current thing” to hate on.
  
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  - Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
    
    Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
    
    That’s just how it is.
    
    Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until concrete actions prove otherwise, but that just me), or that they know the risks but they still think that for many games it’s worth it to purchase from Steam given that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
    
    Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” as doesn’t it being so far less enshittified than other similar artifical restrictions on Customers out there-
    
    I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having some knee-jerk reaction based on fucking brand-loyalty like some mindless pimply-faced teen fanboy.
    
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corroded@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
If you’re not receiving physical media, and you’re not saving a copy to local storage, then you’re not buying anything. You’re renting it.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  That’s not even the best metric. You save Destiny 2 to local storage, but you still don’t own that either.
  
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  You can buy a perpetual license and then you own it (the license) regardless of storage or possession.
  
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  - L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    You can’t just go out and buy a perpetual license for any random thing you purchase.
    
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  - corroded@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That’s great until they decide to stop providing whatever content you licensed.
    
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Mango@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Let’s just face it. There isn’t ever going to be a publishing company that doesn’t fuck us however they can for an extra dime. Companies are machines full of people deciding whatever they have to for money.

There also will never be a way they can keep us from just copying files.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  They’ve already invented ways to keep us from just copying files: in that they don’t provide us with all of the files in a lot of cases anymore.
  
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  - Mango@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    If it can display on your screen or play through your speakers, you can copy it.
    
    If it’s software as a service, just don’t buy. We can live without whatever it is they make.
    
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otp@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Do they need “buy” or “purchase”? All they need is “pay”, and nobody would notice.

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- experbia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  “get” or “acquire” or “add to collection” or “snag”… or any other vomit inducing roundabout corporate speak
  
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- Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I would still imagine that has a very different psychological effect. Nobody wants to click a “pay”-button…
  
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  - RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Shopping cart icon, and “checkout”
    
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  - otp@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    People will click whatever’s stopping them from the dopamine hit of adding a game they’re probably not going to play to their library.
    
    It’d be even harder to stop someone who actually WANTS to play the game they’re paying for! Lol
    
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buzz86us@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Just let me buy a license then download it wherever I want

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chemicalprophet@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m not sore how downloading cars works but when I do it it feels like I own it…

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P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Unrelated but what is the aesthetic of the thumbnail’s image?

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- TheKMAP@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Far-cry-blood-dragon-wave
  
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JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Or force them to admit they are selling it for real without all the license mumbo jumbo. They have always known what “buy now” buttons were meant to lead you to believe. And — in my humble opinion — you aren’t wrong for believing that; they are.

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